A worked gold mine in Virginia, closed in 1885
The Greenwood gold mine worked a few years in Prince William County, Virginia, near Independent Hill, at the head of the north branch of Quantico Creek, on ground that is now the far northwestern corner of Prince William Forest Park near Aden and Bristow Roads. It was one of only two known gold mines in the county; the other was the Crawford placer prospect on Neabsco Creek, and small amounts of gold also turned up at the Cabin Branch pyrite mine near Dumfries. Records of it are few: one account has it closing in 1885, while the National Park Service says it was abandoned by 1907.
Greenwood sat on the Virginia Gold-Pyrite belt, which the US Geological Survey also calls the central Virginia volcanic-plutonic belt, running northeast to southwest through Fairfax, Prince William, Stafford, Spotsylvania and eleven more counties. The belt holds three kinds of deposit: massive sulfide bodies like Cabin Branch, mined for sulfur, copper, zinc and lead with gold and silver as byproducts; low-sulfide quartz-gold veins; and gold placers. Most of Virginia's gold mines were worked out by the mid to late 1800s.
At Greenwood the miners sank two vertical shafts, built a stamp mill, and recovered the gold with mercury amalgamation, and that mercury left the mine a known source of contamination in Quantico Creek. The site has since been reclaimed: the shafts were sealed, soil removed or cleaned and tailings taken away, and the Park Service and the USGS keep monitoring wells on the site and downstream on the South Fork of Quantico Creek. A local historian recalled that as late as the Great Depression people still made their way to the old mine and came back with little to show for it.
Little remains on the ground: a few depressions, traces of the shafts and trenches and of buildings whose use is unknown, and the engineered drainage of the cleanup. After the Civil War the land around it was split among small family farms, before it became the park. The park charges an entry fee, and collecting rocks or minerals there is not allowed.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
